[My previous message omitted a word ("records"). I should take one more look at these things before sending them.] Scsh (Scheme Shell) has a mechanism to turn the Unix process interface into something reasonable. Instead of PIDs, fork returns a process object. The SIGCHLD signal handler reaps processes and records their exit status. The program can retrieve the exit status using the process object. When the process object is GCed, the status can be as well. This seems be right for almost all code (and reaping policy can be changed for the remaining code.) The details of Scsh's mechanism can be found in the manual ftp://ftp-swiss.ai.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh-manual.ps on pages 55-58. mike